The Tyger meets the neighbours

12:01AM BST 27 Mar 2007

Alastair Sooke reviews Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier

Ever since Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier has enjoyed mainstream success as a historical novelist, and her fifth book doesn't break this tried-and-tested mould. Burning Bright is set in London in 1792 and dramatises the fortunes of a family of bumpkins called the Kellaways, who travel from "Dorsetshire" to the big smoke after the sudden death of their eldest son Tommy, who falls from a pear tree.

They rent a couple of cramped rooms in Lambeth next door to the pamphleteer, printmaker and poet William Blake, who has recently completed printing the 27 plates of Songs of Innocence and is about to embark on the composition of its darker companion piece, Songs of Experience.

The two books form a symbolic backdrop to the development of Chevalier's protagonists: Tommy's younger brother Jem, a decent lad learning his father's trade as a chair-maker, and Maggie, a spirited guttersnipe who flits around the neighbourhood causing mischief and introduces Jem to devious, wheeler-dealing London life. They form a strong attachment, and for the most part the book reads like an adolescent love story. Maggie and Jem are on the cusp of sexual maturity, so the novel traces the path they tread from - you guessed it - innocence to experience.

This is hardly the most original premise, but then originality can't be high among Chevalier's priorities: the entries on Amazon for titles alluding to Blake's poem "The Tyger" run into double figures. Chevalier might argue that there's nothing new under the sun, and that she's taken a familiar tale and fashioned it afresh. Certainly, Burning Bright moves along at a fair old lick. It's the kind of brisk and breezy yarn that might be devoured with pleasure over the course of a long flight.

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But don't be fooled into believing that this is top-end writing. It's not. There is something curiously vacant about Chevalier's prose. Barely a word in the book makes you sit up and take note. Almost every character conforms to some two-dimensional type: Maggie's father is a lovable rogue; the Kellaways' landlady is a sour old gossip; Jem's father is a rustic simpleton who's also honest and worthy; his employer, Philip Astley, the owner of the local circus, is a loud-mouthed showman; Astley's son, John, is a dashing young rake.

The prospect of such flat creations pitted against Blake, one of the most complex writers in the English language, is like watching a lion surrounded by alley cats. And although he appears frequently during the novel, Blake is usually seen from the point of view of Maggie and Jem, so that he remains distant, adult, unknowable. More often than not, he imparts cryptic philosophical teasers to mentor their transition from innocence to - clunk - experience.

The first time we glimpse him is instructive. Maggie and Jem catch sight of Blake and his wife enjoying a spot of alfresco sex in their summerhouse. The message is clear: Chevalier's Blake is not the radical Romantic poet of history, but an avatar of two teenagers' sexual awakening. Apart from a few simple lyrics from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake's wildfire poetry doesn't get a look in.

There are other irritations, too. The Kellaways are given a "Dorsetshire" dialect of mangled grammar and cider-woozy yokel-speak, full of forelock-tugging thank'ees and twee ejaculations. The London slang, teeming with Lord-a-mercies, is not much better.

Chevalier is often praised for her skill in conjuring the smells and textures of the past. Here, this amounts to repeated cameos from an army of street hawkers selling everything from shrimps and potatoes ("Lovely tatties, don't yer want some tatties!") to gingerbread and strawberries. They have been too transparently shoehorned in to provide historical "colour", which unravels their raison d'être, and are about as convincing as extras in a low-budget period drama on TV.

So, what can we take away from Burning Bright? The lesson that proximity to greatness doesn't mean that greatness will rub off. Chevalier could have quoted Blake until she was blue in the face. It still wouldn't have elevated her pleasantly diverting story above the ordinary.